FILM SOUNDTRACK A BITTERSWEET LIFE COMPOSERS JANG YOUNG-KYU, DALPALAN

Film music and Kim Jee-woon:
A Bittersweet Life (2005) original soundtrack

The significance of music in the highly iconographic films of Kim Jee-woon is seldom touched on but worth consideration. The use of contemporary radio hits in The Quiet Family, The Foul King and The Good, The Bad, The Weird, and importantly atypical orchestration in A Tale of Two Sisters, A Bittersweet Life and again The Good, The Bad, The Weird speaks volumes for the director’s approach. In his debut film The Quiet Family (1998), Kim plays fast and loose with American popular culture and representational conventions. The exuberant soundtrack intersperses retro Long Island band The Stray Cats and Latin-inflected hip hop with The Partridge Family ditty “I Think I Love You” and Memphis soul/rock band The Box Tops; this wonderfully antiquated vision of recycled Americana is further refined by the repetition in several hokey grave-digging and father-on-the-toilet sequences of Nilsson’s “Jump Into the Fire,” the bubbling, tumbling rock tune which Martin Scorsese integrated so well into the final Stones/Harrison rock melange of Goodfellas (1990, U.S.). While his warm-hearted follow-up The Foul King (2000) is positively barren alongside his debut in musical terms, it marked Kim’s first collaboration with Jang

Young-kyu, whose minimalist electronic score crosses back and forth between easygoing vignettes and scrappily merry interludes (at times creeping in an idiophone for good measure, and a Morricone riff in the denouement).

For A Tale of Two Sisters (2003), Kim collaborated with the prolific composer Lee Byung-woo, in whose trusty musical care he originally bestowed his Three segment Memories (2002). (Lee has since scored such whopping genre titles as The Red Shoes, The Host, Voice of a Murderer, Hansel & Gretel, Mother and Haeundae.) The result was a profound and unsettling score, eschewing the sort of shrieking, Hermannian variations so regularly used in horror cinema for an extraordinary series of nostalgic cues. Culminating in the perfect “Lullaby,” Lee’s melodies and themes are often at odds with the piercing tone of the film, contrasting the pain of memory and desire with the paranoid sensibilities and Lynchian distortion of a Badalamenti cue. For the positively bonkers The Good, The Bad, The Weird (2008), a score so indiscriminate and unshackled that it genrifies for the film’s rollicking setpiece Nina Simone’s touching “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,” Kim collaborated again with Jang Young-kyu and new arrival Dalpalan. For their efforts both artists were nominated in the Composers category at the 3rd Asian Film Awards (they lost out, not unjustly, to Joe Hisaishi). Before this, however, Jang and Dalpalan worked together on Kim’s revenge thriller A Bittersweet Life (2005), producing an excellent score which deserves closer inspection.

Kim Jee-woon’s A Bittersweet Life (2005) was scored by Jang Young-kyu and Dalpalan, featuring Japanese pianist Kuramoto Yuhki

The musicians were joined importantly by Japanese pianist Kuramoto Yuhki, who recorded the film’s critical music cue entitled “Romance.” In addition, the composers pay homage to the late classical Spanish guitarist Francisco Tarrega, whose “Etude in E Minor” becomes the signature tune of (and in key respects typifies) the album. What emerges is an unusually jazzy and highly individualistic score which does a fine job of encapsulating the different themes of the film. These include our hero Sun-woo’s loyalty to Kang, the romantic melody for Hee-soo (the girl he shadows), the very culture of femininity which she embodies and which is still unique to Sun-woo, the besieging of Kang by “friendly” enemies, the slapstick fun to be had with knuckleheads Myung-gu and Mikhail, the vengeance theme which pushes the confrontation with Kang in the hotel’s Sky Lounge, and lastly, but of course, Sun-woo’s relationship with his own reflection and image, a motif which the director endows here with great significance. In its simplicity, for example, “Follow” transforms the initial spark of wonder that takes hold of Sun-woo into an unobtrusively cool, tinkling arrangement, the purposeful rhythm of it repeating again as our hero drives into the city late at night, the erotic undertone of the theme surfacing towards the close as he gazes down upon Hee-soo in a busy night-club flirting with her lover on the dance-floor. The “Romance” cue is based on the source music to which Hee-soo later plays cello accompaniment, and though the motif is never once repeated on the album it finds corresponding value nonetheless in familiar themes like “Irreversible Time,” its reprise “(Quartet) Irreversible Time” and in the wry sadness of “Fairness.” With the exception of Tarrega’s “Etude in E Minor,” perhaps the most recognisable cue is “My Sad Night,” which marks the formal introduction on the album of classical guitar and folk elements. A loose and fanciful arrangement, the cue catches the specifically European influences of the film.

Jang and Dalpalan then provide variations on established themes. For “Escape” they produce a strange synthesised sound which builds to a slower, serious and other-worldly take on the call-to-arms cue “Sky Lounge,” while the more threatening (for being so subtle) “Red Lounge” pulls away from the melody of “Escape” (its close cousin), finally reprising the leitmotif of the album on piano for a telling shift in the fadeout. “A Bittersweet Life II” brings appropriately a sense of small-scale intimacy and heritage to the underworlds of crime bosses Kang and Baek; and though it’s listed after “A Bittersweet Life II” as track number ten on the album (and understandably so), the reprise, entitled “A Bittersweet Life,” appears first in the film over a magnificent scene in which Sun-woo decides that his only course of action is to take bloody revenge against Kang.

Kim used a range of popular songs in his debut The Quiet Family (1998)

Lee Byung-woo composed a nostalgic score for A Tale of Two Sisters (2003)

The most successful track on the album is of course “Sky Lounge,” the film’s introductory music cue. Since vanity is the key theme here, virtually every frame in this sequence is elegantly composed and the grooming impeccable. But for pure swagger and propulsive energy the sequence is indebted to the music: from the eponymous Sky Lounge of the title, where Sun-woo savours one final taste of that exquisite dessert on his table, to the lower levels of the hotel where patrons cross its unblemished marble floors, from the thumping club room where drunken men encumber their young mistresses shepherding them away from harm, to an exclusive member’s suite where Sun-woo has to turf out a trio of petty gangsters — the cue (and the scene) is all about ego and hubris. It rounds out a robust and thoughtful arrangement of eloquent and exciting compositions, and as soundtracks go A Bittersweet Life is a classic of modern Korean cinema.

10 March, 2011

This piece was originally published by New Korean Cinema.

EVENT THE LONDON KOREAN FILM FESTIVAL 2010 VENUE O.W.E., APOLLO PICCADILLY, I.C.A.

The 5th London Korean Film Festival 2010,
Korean film back in the West End
(5-23 November)

This year the London Korean Film Festival UK (LKFF) screened twenty-one films, hosted six Q&A sessions, held two filmmaker retrospectives, generated good publicity in the West End, and had few if any restrictions on admission at the point of purchase, making it easy for theatergoers to attend many of the screenings they wanted. Its only flaw was the shunting into the ICA’s ugly theater space and tiny screening room of a whole range of lauded and popular films. These included the erotic comedy The Servant (2010) from director Kim Dae-woo, the prison drama Harmony (2010) starring Lost’s Kim Yun-jin, revenge-horror Bedevilled (2010), and the mystery thrillers Bestseller (2010) and Moss (2010). Also in the ICA mix were four of the most anticipated LKFF films: Jang Hoon’s Secret Reunion (2010) starring Song Kang-ho, Im Sang-soo’s thriller The Housemaid (2010) with Jeon Do-yeon (plus Q&A), Joseon-dynasty actioner Blades of Blood (2010), and John H Lee’s Korean War film 71 into the Fire (2010), which marks the 60th anniversary of the war. Lastly, the ICA hosted Tony Rayn’s ‘What is the future of Korean film?’ panel discussion with the filmmaker Jang Jin.

Top of many a fan’s list was Lee Jeong-beom’s The Man From Nowhere (2010), an action shoot-’em-up starring the Korean heartthrob Won Bin; and Kim Jee-woon’s “bloody vengeance” movie I Saw the Devil (2010) which the director describes dryly as “a love story about a man who is willing to do anything for the one he loves”. Both films helped to launch the festival at the Odeon West End: The Man From Nowhere on Friday 5 November with a director’s Q&A, I Saw the Devil on 6 November, also with director’s Q&A.

I saw both and neither really struck a chord with originality, but such is the messy curatorial business of film selection. Lee’s The Man From Nowhere shared some common virtues with lesser known, social agenda films on the programme — via its commentary on human trafficking and organ harvesting — but Kim Jee-woon's I Saw the Devil, which stars two actors of charisma and great talent in Choi Min-sik and Lee Byung-hun, was a disappointment. This said, the prestige Kim lends the festival as one of the top directors in Korean cinema is absolutely indispensable, and his popularity here in the city probably far greater than he realises. Elsewhere, the Institute of Contemporary Arts’ effort to support and manage the bulk of the L.K.F.F.’s screenings was welcomed—its café/bar a decent place to catch up with others, the cinema reasonable enough to fit in Im Sang-soo’s Q & A—but the venue for the roundtable sucked: the theatre space was still set up for amdram, advertising stands came in late, and for good measure the seating was 1000 times worse than high school. But the topic—the future of the Korean film industry—was wholly prescient.

Cha Tae-sik (Won Bin) in Lee Jeong-beom’s The Man From Nowhere (2010)

In the last five years, the production of multi-purpose would-be blockbusters has bolstered commercial cinema, deepening anxieties regarding the promotion of domestic independent filmmakers and the sustainability of New Korean Cinema. Rayns, Simon Ward and mainstream filmmaker Jang Jin considered many aspects of the film business, including the present distribution system after the old lines collapsed, sources of financing for independents, and the merits of the Korean Film Council (K.O.F.I.C.)—a state-funded organisation which, for Jang at least, is having little success fostering artistic experimentation via its promotion, theatrical distribution and direct funding initiatives. In fairness, though, K.O.F.I.C. surely is about helping budding student filmmakers with short films and independents that can play internationally more than anything else? Bringing things back to the festival itself, Ward discussed the role of the Independent Cinema Office (I.C.O.) and particularly its association with K.O.F.I.C. and the Korean Cultural Centre in composing a viable film programme.

The addition of the Piccadilly Apollo on the list of venues showed the organisers’ ambition to enhance the L.K.F.F.’s image as a prestigious, cosmopolitan event. Consequently, crossing La Galleria Pall Mall to the mini-club atmosphere of the Apollo was some antidote to the I.C.A.: intelligent lighting system, relaxed lounge rooms, reflective surfaces, I’ll bet the place has a late night license too. For this opulent setting, the festival organisers mounted a Jang Jin retrospective. Jang’s visibility as a “pivotal voice” in Korean cinema (though amusingly he himself proposed “mysterious creature” as a more fitting description) is certainly less clear to audiences in the U.K.—particularly to those for whom Kim Ki-duk and Hong Sang-soo’s distinction has already been well confirmed—but his films, nonetheless, helped to differentiate this year’s festival from those of previous years, tactfully guiding our eye away from auteur showmen like Bong Joon-ho (2009) and Park Chan-wook (2007) if only to deposit us in the fairly mainstream realm of the black comedy, satirical thriller and the romcom. The exhibition featured Guns & Talks (2001), the sweetly comic Someone Special (2004), Murder Take One (a.k.a., The Big Scene, 2005) which screened at the L.K.F.F.’s inaugural launch four years ago, and Good Morning President (2009), a film which outgrossed Park Chan-wook’s Thirst at last year’s box office. In this, the festival’s reputation was well deserved, due to its close co-ordination of the four screenings with post-film Q & A sessions and film-specific introductions by the director.

Of this, however, there can be no doubt: the festival badly needs female contributors and filmmakers. I don’t mind attending the retrospectives and high-profile visits, but between Jang, Kim, Im, Lee Jeong-beom, Ahn Jae-hoon, Simon Field, Simon Ward, Tony Rayns, Jonathan Ross and the South Korean ambassador popping in to wish us all the best, festival priorities are unreservedly edging out the female guests. So this year’s spotlight category included a feature on leading ladies—the four films being Harmony (dir. Kang Dae-gyu, 2010), The Servant (dir. Kim Dae-woo, 2010), Bedevilled (dir. Jang Cheol-soo, 2010) which I think was screened earlier this summer at FrightFest, and the most relevant, Paju (dir. Park Chan-ok, 2009)—but to my knowledge Han Hye-jin, the co-director on the animated Green Days (co-dir. Ahn Jae-hoon, with whom Ahn runs Studio M.W.P.), was the only woman promoting Korean cinema this year. On the face of it, rare opportunities might have passed this Autumn to involve international star Kim Yoon-jin (Harmony) or the awesomely talented Jeon Do-yeon (The Housemaid), but as the press gambits for both films ended long ago (they screened in January and May respectively) nothing much was going to happen on that front. This has to change. If the L.K.F.F. is to continue revamping itself and consolidate its position alongside the London Film Festival as one of the finest film cultural events in this city—and it deserves its reputation—then perhaps it can turn to film actresses like Yum Jung-ah and Bae Doo-na. As cultural ambassadors with interests that extend beyond cinema, both actresses would change the mindset of future festivalgoers for the better.

28 November, 2010

FILM I SAW THE DEVIL DIRECTOR KIM JEE WOON

Kim Jee-woon’s I Saw the Devil (2010)
‘Battle not with monsters’

Noteworthy for being the first feature in which South Korean director Kim Jee-woon has no formal writing credit (and less so for the number of cuts — seven — which were made to appease the Korea Media Rating Board, a sensationalist story which is publicised anywhere the film plays internationally), I Saw the Devil is an undeniably engaging thriller, thanks in no small part to the slapstick mannerisms of lead actor Choi Min-sik and the streetwise populism of megastar Lee Byeong-heon. The film’s formidable pairing of internationally renowned stars, its relatively high profile crew including Lee Mo-gae (who also shot this year’s Secret Reunion, in addition to Kim’s A Tale of Two Sisters and The Good The Bad and The Weird) and Nam Na-young (who has edited mainstream works like Castaway on the Moon, Insadong Scandal, and The Doll Master), its spotless production values and big budget (the reported $6 million is extraordinary for a horror thriller) immediately suggest a multi-purpose event movie, a highly marketable package which its makers hope will capitalise on international territories and help rekindle industry fortunes in light of a poor 2009.

But if I Saw the Devil is indeed intended as a blockbuster then it’s a curious one with a far from expansive audience. The casting of Lee in the lead role of Kim Soo-hyeon is the only concession to a female demographic, while the presence of content that showcases violence, nudity, bloody gore, cannibalism and dismemberment is likely to appeal to a predominantly male adult audience (the film’s 18+ rating, which prohibits teenagers, severely limits its prospects at the box-office). Even in Korea, where it was distributed by Showbox, the marketing aestheticised the bloody conflict between the two stars, pairing them off in tight smoky close-ups, and barely noting the presence of other cast members. Crucially, I Saw the Devil premiered this August in Korea one week after its biggest rival, Lee Jeong-beom’s The Man From Nowhere, and it has not measured at all well since in aesthetic, critical or financial terms — this despite the reappearance of its major star (Choi Min-sik) after a five year screen absence.

Motivated by a need to punish the man who murdered his fiancée and then desecrated her body,
Kim Soo-hyeon (Lee Byeong-heon) embarks on a ruthless campaign of vigilantism which transforms him ultimately into the object of his own obsessive rage

I Saw the Devil opens with the discovery by the roadside of a stranded car and a vicious assault on its sole occupant, Joo-yeon (Oh San-ha). Her assailant, Kyeong-cheol (Choi), snatches her body from the scene and returns her to his lair where she is summarily executed, dismembered and the body parts deposited by a culvert shortly thereafter. However, it turns out that Joo-yeon’s fiancé Kim Soo-hyeon (Lee) is a highly skilled and well-regarded federal agent; with the Chief’s unspoken blessing, Soo-hyeon vows to hunt down the culprit and seek violent revenge against him. Thus his reason for tracking Kyeong-cheol is already a spurious one: convinced that Joo-yeon’s execution was itself a meaningless and predatory act, he requires neither an explanation nor necessarily a confession from the man responsible; he instead administers his own punishment, matching brute force with brute force. When Soo-hyeon finally overcomes his prey in the film’s key setpiece (a much publicised night sequence shot in a series of greenhouses), he tags Kyeong-cheol with a sensor, breaks one of his hands, and then leaves him in his own burial plot, ostensibly to die but in truth to recover. It is only after he has fully regained his composure and been tempted to assault another that Soo-hyeon next intervenes, a decision, partly judicious, which endows his vengeance-driven acts of violence with a peculiar moral quality.

On this very theme, Park Hoon-jung’s script plays fast and loose with an assortment of morally superior and inferior characters. On the one hand are those innocents who are overpowered by unimaginable evil, like Soo-hyeon and Joo-yeon, who are in many ways the contented couple happy with their lot before Kyeong-cheol tears them apart; in addition, there are Soo-hyeon’s father-in-law, ex-Squad Chief Jang (Jeon Gook-hwan), and his sister-in-law Se-yeon (Kim Yoon-seo), both virtuous people who implore him not to take revenge and risk throwing the family further into turmoil; and Han Song-I (Yoon Chae-yeong), a nurse working in the practice of the old doctor (Kim Jae-geon) who treats Kyeong-cheol after his first showdown with Soo-yeon. Fleshing out the pathological element of the film are the first two suspects on Soo hyeon’s hit list, Jjang-goo (Yoon Byeong-hee) and the unnamed cyclist (Kil Geum-seong); two taxi burglars (Lee Seol-goo and Jeong Mi-nam) who opportunistically prey on hitchhikers in the night; Kyeong-cheol’s old buddy Tae-joo (Choi Moo-seong), a cannibal whose pathology is never really explained (though he fits the cinematic tradition of the now obsolete slaughterhouse worker); and Tae-joo’s insane accomplice Se-jeong (Kim In-seo). As this short list demonstrates, I Saw the Devil is acute in presenting a range of virtues and vices for a distinct range of character types, not individuals. This places added pressure on actor Lee Byeong-heon who must work doubly hard to convey his character’s transformation from devastated victim to haunted perpetrator through several key exchanges with his animalistic adversary. For his part, Choi seems to be in his element (though no way near his best), trumping Robert De Niro’s sweaty Max Cady from Cape Fear (dir. Martin Scorsese, 1991) with a technically brilliant performance which sees him meting out remorseless forms of punishment in one scene and in the next tumbling from his car like a startled Foghorn Leghorn.

Since Choi’s Kyeong-cheol is classified as irredeemably psychotic from the outset, tension in the picture can only and does ultimately stem from those vengeful cinematic moments which appear to codify Soo-hyeon, the “good” man in this equation, as psychotic — at least in the tradition of these typically “Korean” / Shakespearean serial-killer films. It therefore follows a line of thrillers, procedurals and horrors — Nowhere to Hide (dir. Lee Myung-se, 1999), Park’s Vengeance trilogy (2002/2003/ 2005), A Bittersweet Life (dir. Kim Jee-woon, 2005), A Bloody Aria (dir. Won Shin-yeon, 2006), Beautiful Sunday (dir. Jin Kwang-gyo, 2007), The Chaser (dir. Na Hong-jin, 2008), The Man From Nowhere, even an icy drama like Yang Ik-joon’s sterling Breathless (2009) — which both renounce traditional distinctions of good and evil, and debunk the myth that violence can be in any way constructive or personally rewarding. As portrayed in this movie, vengeance distorts and disorients the hero ethically; I suspect it is not necessarily the monster that Soo-hyeon fears becoming, but that other state of being: isolated and widowed; heart-broken and alone. Soo-hyeon will fully crave the attention again of his soul-mate long after the credits have rolled and Kyeong-cheol’s body found, but Joo-yeon will never answer him, his faith in prayer will diminish year upon year, and so too his sense of purpose. What interests me about this film, then, is that the desire which drives Soo-hyeon to sadism and brutality does not destroy him — this experience, this course of action, while indescribably harrowing, lacking any semblance of a cathartic resolution, and almost certainly tarnishing the man forever, is in some way necessary.

It therefore detracts from the well-acknowledged pattern of the films noted above by shifting the emphasis away from salvation, and in a sense vengeance itself as an abstract concept, onto two core ideas instead: mechanical ritual, and mutual identification. In order for Soo-hyeon to truly experience and release grief he must revert to a truer nature. The film, therefore, taps into the mechanical act of the ritual itself to make its point: vengeance, in this context, can serve a purpose; rather than free Soo-hyeon from grief, it frees him to grieve. The memorable climactic shot in which Lee’s Soo-hyeon is seen wandering aimlessly in Kyeong-cheol’s neighbourhood utterly consumed by unbearable sorrow is an interesting one. Has the terrible nature of his obsession at last hit home? Or does he despair for his own salvation? I trust that neither concern matters to him; he grieves for Joo-yeon. The only other vengeance film to touch on a similar theme is the truly harrowing masterpiece, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, a film which ultimately has more to say on the reality and pain of grief than anything on offer here.

14 November, 2010

FILM SOUNDTRACKS

Five glorious music cues from movie soundtracks

In September I saw the London Philharmonic Orchestra perform the score live for The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003), in honour of which I am writing this. Here are my five favourite O.S.T. cues currently playing on shuffle.


5. A Familiar Taste (The Social Network)

In 1999, the Dust Brothers combined industrial effects and unorthodox musical instruments in their multi-layered Fight Club (1999) score, but for The Social Network (2010), an album alike in technique, director David Fincher teamed with Trent Reznor whose work on The Downward Spiral with the Nine Inch Nails yielded several variations of the track “Closer,” the most intense of which, “Precursor,” was used in the title sequence of Fincher’s classic thriller Se7en (1995). These albums are appropriate to “A Familiar Taste” because they establish a context that isn’t immediately apparent in The Social Network itself — a film about a computer-scientist. I flit between cues like “Hand Covers Bruise” (which, for me, stirs memories of lonely Autumn evenings in the city), “Intriguing Possibilities” (a sort of electronic paean to cyberspace) and “Complication with Optimistic Outcome” (more of a paean to Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982)), but I return to “A Familiar Taste.” The cue appears in its original, longer cut as “35 Ghosts IV” on the Ghosts I-IV double album (which Fincher listened to ritually during the production of Zodiac), but used here in The Social Network it transforms the film’s underscoring into a force.

Chihiro / Sen (voiced by Rumi Hiiragi) in Spirited Away (2001)

4. Day of the River (Spirited Away)

I love Miyazaki’s Spirited Away (2001). I’m in thrall to its purity — of landscape, of mood and character, of Chihiro’s capricious, flawed and stumbling personality. The moment, animated by Miyazaki, when Chihiro ties back her hair and puts it into a band is so precise it just melts me; and likewise, her plaintive stare across the ocean as, from the bathhouse balcony, she sees a train running along the surface of the water: the exhausted worker, legs aching and eyes burning, indulging for a moment in the wonder of fantasy.

At the outset, composer Joe Hisaishi establishes a celestial mood, a cue designed to interest the imagination before a simple piano melody brings us back again to character. Chihiro has just been reacquainted with her transmogrified parents in a pig-pen, where they are lined up for slaughter; horrified, Chihiro vows to save them, then flees outside into the arms of Haku who cheers her up with a generous offering of rice. Here the melody is swept into full ensemble: a child once again in our eyes, she devours the food before breaking down into a pathetic wail (also an action animated by Miyazaki), the delicate switch back to a few instruments a fleeting reminder of just how much sorrow this girl is bottling up. In this way, the score never indulges in sentiment or whimsy, it always looks forward, it always digs deep down and shares the same spirit. Enthused again to try harder, Chihiro runs across the bridge to the bathhouse, the invisible No Face observing everything.

Then, awakening from slumber, Kamaji the old boiler man reaches across the room to slide a blanket over Chihiro, who has tucked herself into a sleeping ball beside the soot-slaves that shift all the coal. Here, Hisaishi’s cue holds on the lullaby melody, dipping out prematurely, as if to deprive us of closure.

Wong Chia Chi / Mak Tai Tai (Tang Wei) with Mr Yee (Tony Leung) in Lust Caution (2007)

3. The Angel (Lust, Caution)

Though only a short track (at little over two minutes), this one calls upon Lust Caution’s (2007) signature “Wong Chia Chi’s Theme,” the melody for which is brought to the fore in isolation later in the album. “The Angel” is the more deeply felt I think and artfully arranged, and as used both in the film (towards its conclusion) and on Alexandre Desplat’s album it just gets me right where I live. The track begins deceptively warm, a fairytale told as memory; at a little under midway it swells to the romantic vision of Wong’s generic theme, but critically the motif doesn’t hold. It cannot believe in the possibility of love, only love’s inherent contradictions; breathless the theme intones to her friends, to her allies, to us that Wong is well and truly lost. The delayed notes passing over the piano invoke a life that is never meant to be; and thus diminished, closed-in and doomed, Wong embraces her fate, head bowed and with eyes shut.

Sun Woo (Lee Byeong-heon) in A Bittersweet Life (2005)

2. Sky Lounge (A Bittersweet Life)

Perhaps the place to begin this one is with Kim Jee-woon’s key collaborations in recent years. For A Tale of Two Sisters (2003), the Korean director worked with the prolific Lee Byung-woo, in whose great musical care Kim originally entrusted his Three (2000) segment, Memories (2003) (Lee has since scored for such whopping genre movies as The Red Shoes (2005), The Host (2006), Voice of a Murderer (2007), Hansel & Gretel (2007), Mother (2009) and Tidal Wave / Haeundae (2009)); for the positively bonkers The Good, The Bad, The Weird in 2008 (a score so indiscriminate and unshackled that it genrifies for its key setpiece Nina Simone’s touching “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” — quite an ostentatious move), Kim collaborated with Jang Yeong-gyu and Dalpalan, and for their efforts both were nominated in the Composers category at the 3rd Asian Film Awards (they lost out, not unjustly, to Joe Hisaishi). But before this, the pair worked together on Kim’s revenge thriller, A Bittersweet Life (2005), and produced an imitative though not unchallenging score which shouldn’t be so easily overlooked. On this, Jang and Dalpalan were joined importantly by Japanese pianist Kuramoto Yuhki, who recorded the film’s critical music cue entitled “Romance” on the album, and in addition sampled the work of the late classical guitarist Francisco Tarrega, whose performance of “Etude in E Minor” brings a sense of small-scale intimacy and heritage to Kang and Baek’s criminal underworld.

The album’s themes do a fine job of encapsulating different aspects of the film. These include our hero Sun Woo’s loyalty to Kang, the romantic melody for Hee Soo (the girl he shadows), the very culture of femininity which she embodies and which is still unique to Sun Woo, the besieging of Kang by “friendly” enemies, the slapstick fun to be had with Myung-gu and Mikhail, the vengeance theme which pushes the confrontation with Kang in the hotel’s Sky Lounge, and finally, Sun Woo’s relationship with his own reflection and image, a motif which the director endows with great importance. In its simplicity, “Follow” for instance characterises the spark of wonder which initially takes hold of Sun Woo, the purposeful rhythm of it repeating again and again as he drives into the city, the erotic undertone of the theme surfacing towards the close as he observes Hee Soo dancing in a busy club with her lover. The cue “Romance” is based on the source music to which Hee Soo later plays cello accompaniment, and though the motif is never once repeated on the album it nevertheless finds corresponding value in the themes of “Irreversible Time,” its reprise “(Quartet) Irreversible Time” and “Fairness.” So while I cannot deny outright the streamlined elegance that is “Follow” or (a track I haven’t even mentioned yet) the seductive “Escape” which is powered by a detached and utterly primal sense of survivalism, I’m going with “Sky Lounge” for my favourite on the album, the film’s introductory music cue. Vanity is the key theme: virtually every frame in this sequence is gorgeous, the grooming impeccable, and it benefits greatly from the presence of the music: from the eponymous Sky Lounge of the title, where Sun Woo savours one final taste of that exquisite dessert on his table, to the lower levels of the hotel where patrons cross its unblemished marble floors, from the thumping club room where drunken assholes encumber their young mistresses shepherding them away from harm, to an exclusive members’ lounge where Sun Woo has to turf out a trio of petty gangsters, it is all about display, discovery, and absolute assurance in the self.

Detective David Mills (Brad Pitt) in Se7en (1995)

1. The Finale (Se7en)

Unlike the music cues listed above I don’t exactly own this on an album (because New Line Records still has not issued a full score) but this may be the only track on my shortlist that I regard as masterful. Howard Shore combined a range of techniques in the past to generate similar apocalyptic textures (see The Silence of the Lambs, 1991; Philadelphia, 1993; and also Cronenberg’s Scanners, 1991; Videodrome, 1983; The Fly, 1986; Dead Ringers, 1988; and Naked Lunch 1991) but in Se7en, acoustic, percussive, electronic and ambient sounds are given a crucial emphasis, as if the very project of his original composition was to sour the film it supports. And I suppose this is the project of the score. In this world, we as the audience are as much the subject of mistrustful scepticism as the honourable characters we follow onscreen; just as the film throws game-show noise and screaming kids and other hostilities our way, so too does Shore’s industrial score, which though certainly more tonal and less overpowering in the film’s first half, nevertheless tugs us beneath the surface on several occasions in its second and we invariably claw hard for breath. Shore stretches conventional instruments thin and slows them down, he mixes pure electronic sounds with live sounds not recorded in a studio, and he articulates absolute unearthly despair once the film is sucked down into the abyss. It is nothing like, for instance, Bernard Hermann’s score for Taxi Driver (1976), the tumbling routine of which becomes one and the same with the paranoid psychopath himself, dragging and stifling his senses. Se7en frightens by touch, it overcomes everything including the sunlight to trouble and hazard the frame.

We hear reverberation in recordings many times when watching film, but only in unique cases is this intended or does it feel correspondingly appropriate to the drama. In “The Finale” reverberation heightens our awareness of the acoustic space in which the recording has been made; when consumed independently of the dialogue and effects track (see the Special Edition DVD), the impression is that of a grand church hall. It restates for me an earlier signature which is heard just once in the track “Searching Doe’s Apartment,” a cue which emphasises the serial killer’s religious background (what Amy Taubin called “a particularly American strain of apocalyptic Christianity”) by establishing the appropriate connections to Catholic mass, to the recitation of prayer, to the presence in one giant space of the faithful. These non-diegetic sounds of mass and prayer are there in “Searching Doe’s Apartment,” but they’re not there in “The Finale.” They echo, rather, due to the accidental or intended elements of human agency. That’s a connection I wonder if other people make, but it is one that really sells the existential doom and magnitude of “The Finale”.

4 November, 2010

Memories (Kim Jee-woon, S Korea, 2002)

FILM SHORT MEMORIES DIRECTOR KIM JEE WOON

In a time-lapse
Kim Jee-Woon’s Memories (Three, 2002)

Kim Jee-Woon’s Memories—a 40 minute short about a separated husband and wife’s attempts to rediscover themselves in the aftermath of a traumatic incident—is the opening installment of Three (aka., Three ... Extremes 2), a horror movie anthology which includes shorts from Thai director Nonzee Nimibutr (“The Wheel”) and Hong Kong director Peter Chan (“Going Home”). Kim’s film fades up on a sleeping man, actor

Jeong Bo-seok, known here only as the “Husband”. The apartment windows are closed, the blinds are drawn, yet the sounds of city life filter through, the expansion of modern Korean society invading every home. The Husband awakens with a start, and Kim Jee-woon’s camera slowly, painstakingly, creeps across the room—too remote to be a subjective eye, it finds firstly a child’s doll, a balloon swinging perpetually in motion, then an open ziplock bag. Kneeling just beside it, a sobbing woman, faceless in the dark, rocks back and forth. She feels his gaze; suddenly in this cold room, the man and woman are aware of each other. This introductory scene is emblematic of the sophistication at work in Memories, a film about uncertainty, desire, guilt, and memory. Its format recalls that of David Lynch’s Lost Highway (France/USA, 1997) or more clearly Mulholland Drive (France/USA, 2001), but in visual terms it is closer in kind to Miike Takashi’s brilliant Audition (1999). In the second half of his film, Miike employs kaleidoscopic photography, neo-noir lighting and jump-cut editing to destabilise our experience as spectators, but his

approach beforehand emphasises a realist style consisting generally of long takes, conventional camera angles and lighting, and continuity editing. This order of representation is in no way unfamiliar, yet our anxiety grows, for everything in the film indicates that we have entered a bleak fantasy. Audition shocks us, ultimately, with imagery, but Memories does not. Kim establishes a world in which commonplace household objects, setting and environment are made irregular and imposing by his selection of camera lenses and carefully placed shadows. With this method Kim emulates a sort of Kubrickian formalism, generating a desire in the viewer to see more within and beyond the clear boundaries of the frame.

Kim establishes a world in which commonplace household objects, setting and environment are made irregular and imposing by his selection of camera lenses and carefully placed shadows

A credits sequence establishes that the Husband is an amnesiac. As the camera discovers the unconscious body of a young woman dressed all in white, a voice-over indicates that the Husband’s wife may be in danger and that her disappearance triggered his amnesia. After he returns home to New Town, Kim shows the “Wife” (played by actress Kim Hye-soo) in a brightly lit daylight scene regaining consciousness in a series of static shots, each fading to black. As she takes in her surroundings it becomes clear that actions are no longer immediate or immanent, life is truncated, edited, film-like. Kim underlines this in his use of jump-cuts. As we see the Wife in close-up a cyclist appears in the middle distance. We see a shot of her turning, a jump-cut brings the cyclist closer, and then a wide shot positioned in the centre of the street shows the cyclist already leaving frame. The shot of the Wife looking into camera—startled by this sudden appearance—indicates that time is fractured for her: there is no continuity between the cyclist appearing in her peripheral vision and, in the next instant, leaving frame.

The Wife awakens, not knowing who she is or even where

Memories wrestles with memory from two diametrically opposed perspectives: 1) the husband for whom the "appearance" of memory—the infiltration of memory into his everyday life—gives expression to feelings of remorse, malevolence and alienation; and 2) the wife, whose ongoing exploration of the wasteland sprawl of New Town is often melancholic and increasingly anachronistic. Kim’s thoughtful cutting technique, which he deploys only in scenes involving the wife, creates a rhythm and motion that’s (usefully) at odds with the husband’s recognition of events, which is slow and contemplative, sometimes microscopically acute. Absent this differentiation, the film would become a sort of insensible cinematic installation.

It’s an eerily naturalistic representation of human memory. These early scenes present a vision of memory that is raw and intentionally disorienting, but which I find fascinatingly ambiguous and accurate. I tend not to remember a conversation in linear flow, for instance, but instead I recall a series of questions asked (the strength of my interest and motivation for each might privilege the memory of asking one question before another in the conversation), a phrase or sentence she used in response, a flirtatious grin, say, which I attribute more meaning to than the hand which drops to touch mine. But this is the problem we encounter: in remembering we prioritise, in the process becoming our own director. Kim complicates things by realising "live" reality as one would a memory, making time surprisingly malleable, making the changing world in his characters’ vision something which is just beyond their full comprehension. Memory seems to be occurring and operating outside of the mind.

But the film does not limit its action systematically to the experiences of its two leads. It follows the gestures of incidental characters in a coffee shop, it adapts itself to the movement of others when they're in the husband's home (even following, and thinking investigatively, Hyun-joo, the wife's sister, as she explores the bedroom for clues of spousal abuse), and it victimises the wife even from the ambiguous position of the taxi driver, at one point motivating the camera to pass over the hood of the car as it tears through the streets of New Town and menace the wife in the back seat where the camera comes to hover. That’s Memories in a nutshell—it cannot really be said that it has a singular way of thinking, a singular philosophy, because it thinks through camera, action and editing from multiple and contradictory perspectives. If we want to speak of a singular film intelligence, the filmind, then we can only realistically comprehend an intelligence that thinks, emotes, intends and depicts in quite radically diverse ways. In this sense, Memories is a playful thinker because it shows us how much it knows about us, and it maps our psychological life from multiple perspectives. Thus raising the question: to whom do all these memories belong? The film, or its characters? The wife spends most of her time chasing the memory of her daughter through the grim landscape of New Town, but just as she believes in the authenticity of the memory, so too does the aware, thinking, feeling film. It is chasing clues in the memories it itself recalls. That’s quite a fantastic proposition—one that is difficult to believe in, but also quite wonderful enough to want to believe in.

2 November, 2007

FILM | A TALE OF TWO SISTERS | DIRECTOR | KIM JEE-WOON

Kim Jee-woon’s A Tale Of Two Sisters (2003)
The Guilt Dream

Recovery brings back terrifying memories of struggling wildly for breath . . . a sense of absolute failure and a very clear understanding of it that makes the last few seconds before blackout seem almost peaceful.

— Hunter S Thompson, The Great Shark Hunt:
Strange Tales from a Strange Time (1980)

A Tale Two Sisters is a guilt dream in extremis. Su-mi’s life is disrupted by the effects of memory, by the emancipatory possibilities of imagination. There is something terrifically indulgent about this form of self-attention yet as Kim’s directorial vision becomes clearer via the film’s double-whammy of revelations, as the sensual and romantic ‘present’ contorts and deferred feelings of guilt return to the surface, and even while Su-mi’s bedevilled father Mu-hyeon wrestles with his own feelings of parental inadequacy and emotional disconnectedness, amongst all of this we can’t help but completely forgive Su-mi for wanting it the way it always was. Accessing the past at least reconnects us with something tangible: it is more real and passionate than her incongruous existence in the hysterical family home, it is more heartening than anything her present identity as the exhausted non-sister and un-daughter can afford her. Why deny her the perfect solace found in self-delusion? Like Tarkovsky’s Solaris, A Tale of Two Sisters positively aches with feeling, with good as well as pathos. We sense it as Su-mi and Su-yeon pore over their mother’s valuables in the bedroom (a batch of

photographs in one hand, a necklace in the other, a pair of worn pumps tucked under the arm; the innocent hope contained within the spell passed down to Su-yeon: “taritakoom, taritakoom”) and when Su-yeon retreats to the protective space of Su-mi’s bed in the early morning, frightened by the noises outside; it’s there in the post-interview subjective POV shot in the back seat of Mu-hyeon’s car as they drive through the yellowing countryside, the air busy with flies, sunlight catching the water.

Su-mi covets the simplicity of the past, and in return it cruelly offers her the illusion of a lost identity. Ever the resourceful one in the relationship we feel, Su-mi becomes again in this temporal loop the permanent provider and guardian, the soulmate and nurturing sub-mother: everything she was she is again now within the wish-fulfilment fantasy of the present. While Su-yeon trots off to eat ground cherries, Su-mi inspects the exterior of the house before they can enter hand-in-hand; after Su-yeon’s brief entombment inside the cupboard where her mother died, Su-mi returns to set her free and give her full reassurance that no one will ever hurt her again — it is the apology she has been yearning to make, and is arguably the centrepiece of the movie.

Yet Su-mi cannot distinguish between reality and sleepwalking daydream; she is overwhelmed by the force of memory and the potency of her own emotion. Things continue as (we suspect) they always did between the pair, but Su-mi’s role carries the trace memory of both her own negligence in the past and the fierce independence of her forming ego. The hubris that commanded her final heavily retaliatory (and totally devastating) confrontation with Eun-ju (which becomes the wound, or fissure, in memory; the source of all negative energies regulating the ‘now’) is writ large in the present, magnified many times and thrust outwards in the theatricality of her various hysterical ‘performances’ within the home.

Ultimately, there is nothing Su-mi can do except to dwell on the past, breathe in at night the familiar scent of winter bed sheets, play outside without inhibition, and later spend the last hour before bedtime writing in her coveted diary before resetting her internal clock again to do more the next day. These are the perfect moments of the past, the soothing instances of perfection that we all have access to but which we all, incapable of mastering time’s final ephemerality, tend to let slip away.

30 June, 2007